


1D107 (From the Beginning)

by threesmallcrows



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, Anxiety, Gen, Piano, Stress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 15:00:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3138527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Shinji plays like he’s choking, like the very air of the house has got its hands around his throat, and stares (when he thinks Kaworu’s not looking) at the piano like it’s some wild beast, like the keys are teeth, snapping at his fingers.</em>
</p><p>Kaworu is a piano teacher, Shinji and Asuka are his students, and they all try and help one another as best they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1D107 (From the Beginning)

As for what Kaworu chooses to say about his appearance, he mainly reacts to their reactions. Most of the time there’s at least a little staring, a small flinching moment of silence despite their best intentions. And of course the younger children gape blatantly. A firm handshake, good eye contact, and level voice usually does it for the adults—from long practice, Kaworu’s learned to ooze normality at first contact like a slug secreting mucus; put them off his reputation of eccentricity (for God’s sake, as if albinos were somehow eccentric by nature, although Kaworu has to admit he is rather eccentric by anyone’s standards). For the kids, if they don’t seem too frightened, Kaworu usually leans down and makes a joke—“Boo, I’m ghost-sensei!” or something along those lines—acknowledging it without having to explain albinism to someone who likely wouldn’t know the word, anyway.

And after enough hours in their homes, around their children and their precious things, after nothing turns chalk-white and his condition turns out not to be, well, catching, everyone slowly begins to settle down. Kaworu has even been told by one of his students, a seven-year-old girl, that his red eyes are “pretty,” which he found surprisingly affecting.

Still, it’s been just about two years since he moved to Japan, and he still doesn’t have many friends—any, if he’s going to be truthful. But that probably has less to do with his appearance and more to do with his personality. Kaworu doesn’t mind it so much. His job involves working with people, after all, and of late he has been very, very busy. So he talks with his students, listens to them play, chats with their parents, downs the occasional cup of tea or snack he’s offered, and if he feels the need to say anything personal, he calls his sister, a mere 8 hours behind in Germany.

What Kaworu means, he supposes, is that he has been accustomed to being other since the day he was born. Stares and pointing are the status quo.

Which makes his meeting with the Ikaris all the more unusual.

From the first, they’re different from his other students. Sure, at the level he’s at, Kaworu expects his students’ families to be fairly wealthy—he hardly undervalues his teaching skills, although he tries not to inflate them either. The Ikari house, however, is something else. It’s off at the edges of Tokyo, and not in the suburbs, either, but a section of the city that’s industrial, chemical-sterile with gleaming glass and corporation logos and laboratories and a super-computing facility. People come here to work, not to live. Then again, hearsay and a quick Google search tell that Gendo Ikari is the head of NERV Corp., so it’s not all that unusual that he’d want to skip the daily commute.

Humming the last few bars of an old American song, Kaworu steers his ancient Honda Accord (bought secondhand and of highly questionable record) up the long, long gravel driveway. He has plenty of time to contemplate the steel-spined house looming on the ridge above him. An old-fashioned—maybe he should say traditional?—affair, all wooden peaks and extra wings, squatting massively on its hill like a toad. He’s been in plenty of more-than-nice homes before, but never one quite so large, and never one that smelled quite so strongly of wealth.

He parks dead center in the driveway, for lack of an alternative. The doorknocker glares at him fiercely—a massive Chinese-style lion’s head, ring clenched between its teeth like a dare. Kaworu quashes the ridiculous urge to beg its permission, reaches for the ring, and raps twice on the door. He does it lightly enough, but the sound seems to echo through the entire building, the brass sound reverberating back and forth and back again until the whole house moans of his intrusion.

He winces, steps back just in time for the door to open. He expects a servant, but what he gets is Gendo Ikari himself.

The strange, strange thing about the man is the way he doesn’t act. He doesn’t stare; rather, he doesn’t seem to notice Kaworu’s appearance at all. This fact is so utterly jarring that Kaworu feels, perversely, rather naked. He catches himself wondering if Gendo could possibly be blind, which is obviously untrue but would at least explain this—strangeness. 

“Mr. Ikari? I’m Kaworu Nagisa, it’s nice to meet you.”

Gendo’s hands are dry and strong as two slabs of steel.

“I’ll take you to Shinji.”

Trailing a few vague steps behind him, Kaworu gets the feeling he’s not getting tea and cookies this time.

Surprise number two—Shinji does not resemble his father in the slightest. The boy is round of face where his father’s is square, scrawny to Gendo’s sheer solidness, timid to bold, nervous to certain. Kaworu guesses he’s fourteen or thereabouts, although he does come across as young for his age.

It’s highly tempting to whisper to him don’t worry, I find your dad scary too, but Gendo isn’t so much a presence as a force behind them, so Kaworu bites his tongue and sticks to the usual handshake of an introduction. The boy’s hand is limp and slightly sweaty, despite the coldness of the house.

Before Kaworu can say anything more, Gendo commands, “Play the Liszt.”

Shiinji clamps his eyes shut like a coltish soldier about to fire, raises his hands to the keys, and plays.

And Kaworu is adrift, a storm-tossed bird in a hurricane of feathers, buffeted by his brothers. Fearful, frantic, seeking shelter. Hurtling skywards so fast he threatens to escape gravity’s hold altogether, before plummeting. A pixel in a sea of static, a single molecule in a shifting cloud raging over the land, raining down desperate screeches. Air cold, wet, stinging; blinded, and the rain coming down like needles…

It’s done. Kaworu opens his eyes, breathing deeply of the silence. Shinji is hunched on the bench, arms still held tense as claws over the keys—the muscles in his wrists must be aching. His gaze and the keys are locked in contact as firmly as two arm-wrestlers.

Gendo, Gendo is watching Kaworu. The clearing of his throat is a rasp of sandpaper. “He isn’t much,” he says stiffly. “The hope is that he’ll grow some—physically—then he’ll have more power and his chords won’t be as weak. His hands are still small.”

Yes, Kaworu thinks, he can see that. Small hands with small fingers, trembling with strain, discarded in his lap like two white shells.

“Well, he’s brilliant,” he says to him, and as an afterthought, to Shinji: “You’re brilliant.”

The man nods, curt, and Kaworu wishes his relief wasn’t so palpable.

The boy does not look up; says nothing at all.

()

After three weeks or so, Kaworu puts his foot down.

The excuse he offers Gendo over the phone is that the commute is too much—which, really, it is, forty-five minutes of driving, one-way. But the real motivation is that it’s become abundantly clear to Kaworu that Shinji will never improve in that house. He plays like he’s choking, like the very air of the house has got its hands around his throat, and stares (when he thinks Kaworu’s not looking) at the piano like it’s some wild beast, like the keys are teeth, snapping at his fingers. Even the room they practice in is all wrong, too empty, the walls so white they’re almost confrontational. A speck of a mistake, there, stands out like an inkblot on paper, and how is anyone supposed to create something beautiful if they can’t make mistakes?

Shifting the phone to the other ear as he makes himself toast, Kaworu tells Gendo that Shinji’s school is close enough to his home that it’d take him twenty minutes on the metro and a brief walk to get there. “I happen to have some slots open at the right time—but we’d have to do two two-hours, instead of—

He senses Gendo’s reluctance from the start, but manages to talk him around. At the end of it all, he’s got Shinji down for four-to-six, Mondays and Wednesdays, tacked on at the tail-end of a block of lessons. 

Kaworu replaces the phone in its cradle and singes his fingers getting the bread out of the toaster.

He doesn’t think he’s had a single conversation with the boy, all this time. That won’t do.

He understands as well as anyone (better, probably) the peculiar oppression of place, the power of the human psyche to assign formidable powers to objects as ordinary as walls, a bench, an instrument. If Shinji’s house is a battleground, perhaps his can be a haven of sorts.

He reaches for his calendar to pencil Shinji in, and smiles when he notices the name of the student before him.

()

Asuka’s in the middle of a particularly stormy section of Chopin when Kaworu hears his buzzer ring. The girl doesn’t falter in the slightest, so he leaves her attacking the keys and goes to let Shinji in.

He hadn’t quite intended for Shinji’s first impression of his house to be like this: under siege by a hailstorm of angry notes. He resists the urge to make a joke about needing an umbrella; waves him in and mouths at him to sit down, before wading back in towards Asuka.

The song doesn’t let up for another three minutes, and Asuka plays faster and faster before smashing into the final chords. Spectacular but messy, rather like a racecar crash—every time that girl has lessons, Kaworu hopes his Steinway doesn’t bruise.

She flicks her hair off her shoulders, come undone from the sheer strength of her playing, and glares at Kaworu as if challenging him to criticize her. Which he does, gently but firmly, like steering a bull by the elbow. If angry loud-mouthed flame-haired children were enough to scare Kaworu off, he’d have quit teaching a long time ago. 

Usually the slightest criticism results in her arguing with him, which is always somewhat amusing to Kaworu, but this time he senses her words are reined in by curiosity about this new creature behind her. Shinji’s practically shaking in his boots, so Kaworu does the introductions. 

“Oh, yes, there’s someone new after you. This is Shinji Ikari. Ikari-kun, this nice girl is Asuka Langley.”

Shinji sticks a hand out like he’s expecting it to get chopped off, and mutters something that might be “nice to meet you” if Kaworu taped it, slowed down the speed by three and lowered the pitch.

Asuka stares at Shinji’s outstretched hand like he’s offering her a large, squirming bug. “Cool,” she says scathingly, before flouncing out the door in a flash of blue, tossing a “Bye Kaworu” over her shoulder like a burnt-out cigarette end.

Kaworu sighs and tries not to smile. That went—about as well as he’d expected it to. “Don’t worry about Asuka-san, she can be a little…abrupt.”

“She doesn’t like me,” Shinji mutters after a moment.

“Ikari-kun, I’ve been teaching her for two years, and I still don’t know if she likes me. Now, what’s your poison?”

Shinji stares blankly at him. “Drinks,” clarifies Kaworu. “I’ve some juice, coffee, tea.”

When Shinji gives him a bewildered stare, Kaworu prompts, “I’m having tea myself, so if you’d like…”

“Y-yeah, that’s, uh, that’s fine.” 

“All right, then.” In the relative privacy of the kitchen, Kaworu allows his smile to drop for a moment, and releases an irritated sigh to wander around the counter like a little sprite. He gets the feeling Shinji Ikari is going to be his own kind of head case. If Asuka’s the bull in the china shop, now he has to worry about Shinji cutting himself on the leftover pieces.

He pours the tea into two mismatched cups and carries them back out, smile back on. “Here you go.” Shinji takes the tiniest of sips, like it really is poison, as Kaworu settles in a nearby armchair.

For a while there’s nothing but silence. Kaworu tries to think of something to ask that’s neither banal nor intrusive. The problem with social niceties is that you can never get to the meat of issues at once. Back when he was at university, there was nothing Kaworu hated more than the “name-field-where you’re from” trio. He’d much prefer to ask questions like, “Why do you play?” and “What feelings do you get from performing your favorite piece?”

He realized quickly enough that people don’t respond well when you ask them things they’re not expecting to hear. And since, back then, he wasn’t considerate enough to stoop to playing by their rules, he’d very soon found himself alone all over again.

Luckily, Shinji speaks first.

“She’s… very good.”

Kaworu smells self-pity and moves to squash it. “I only take on talented students.”

“Is she going to the Volgograd?”

And there it is, incessant: the Volgograd, the Volgograd. Kaworu hates trophy sharks, but whatever Shinji is, he isn’t a shark of any sort.

So he just says, “I think she is, but don’t worry about her. Asuka’s not your competition.”

“But she is,” says Shinji petulantly.

“Comparing you and her is like apples and oranges. Your qualifying pieces are totally different, so please try and put it out of your mind, okay?” He smiles and adds, “I wouldn’t want my students poisoning each other so early on. Now, let’s start with scales from C.”

()

Shinji is in training for the Volgograd Grand, a Japanese contest inspired by the Russian original. Limited strictly to piano players, the competition has launched some of the most talented concert pianists today into the spotlight. Kaworu himself got his start through a similar competition in America. The contest is only about nine months from now, which means Shinji’s pieces have already been picked, and the foundations laid down. Although Kaworu would have much preferred to guide Shinji towards picking something of his own taste, he’ll have to make do with what he’s been given—

Which is a ridiculously challenging Rachmaninoff, which Kaworu freely admits to Shinji he’ll have to work at alongside with him. And work he does, late into the night after he’s through all his students, hunched in the golden pool of a single desk lamp like a craftsman at his workbench, sheets of notes spread before him like the world’s densest blueprints.

Sometimes he’ll look up, rolling his neck, and wonder if Shinji’s at the piano as well. He’ll imagine him, curled hesitant as a comma at the bench, afloat in that white page of a room, manufacturing octaves and tenths and impossibly quick delicate strings of tripled-back notes like static-colored lace. He’ll wonder if he’s happy; what he’s thinking about, what his dreams will be made of, before his mind flits to other students, other places and times. His thoughts tugging him into the night sky; the Rachmaninoff anchoring his feet to the ground.

()

When Shinji walks in on Wednesday, Asuka and Kaworu are in the middle of cake.

It’s a small cheesecake, round and butter-pale like a miniature moon. Nothing grand, no “Happy Birthday!” in obnoxious red lettering; that’s the sort of thing that Kaworu guessed Asuka wouldn’t like, so he’d told the people at the bakery to leave off the congratulations.

It’s a thing Kaworu does for all his students, although he usually restricts himself to something smaller, a little pastry with some icing on top or some such thing. But Asuka…

The odd thing about teaching, he thinks, is that it’s rather like eating a sliver’s worth of cake. You only get the briefest taste of people’s lives, but what you see is a cut to the core, an hour-wide cross-section of bitter-dark arguments and the sweetest love, the sugary icing of appearances layered over whatever substance lies beneath.

In Asuka’s case, he tastes emptiness, airy and hollow like one of those cheap yellow sponge confections you can buy for five dollars on discount. Her father is alive but absent, and Kaworu has never seen, spoken to, or had any other interaction with the man. According to Asuka, he’s living in Germany, “doing boring business stuff.” It’s the mother the girl clings to, but from it seems there’s not much hope there either. Even when he’d taught Asuka at her house, Kaworu had hardly glimpsed the woman, a small, thin shade of a creature, a melted crayon to Asuka’s flaming war paint. The two of them had tumbled about in their gigantic house like two mismatched socks in a laundry machine, the girl trying desperately to fill all that airspace with her words, like plugging a grapeshot tank with bandaids.

He remembers the first time she paid for lessons: Asuka so much smaller then, only twelve years old. When she whipped the checkbook out of her schoolbag Kaworu thought that she’d stolen it.

She had rifled through to a random check, and asked him for the amount owed, pen poised authoritatively over the paper.

“Are those yours?”

Asuka gave him a look like he was an idiot. “I’m twelve, of course they’re not mine. They’re Mom’s.”

“Not that I don’t trust you, but I think she should be the one filling those out.”

She sighed, probably thinking that she didn’t have the time for this nonsense. “Look, sensei.” She flipped through the book, just slow enough that Kaworu could see the scrawled signature on each check. “She signed all of them already, okay? So you can stop worrying that they’re—like, not valid, or whatever. Just tell me how much.”

Later, she’d added out of nowhere, “Mom trusts me.” And Kaworu had thought, I never asked.

That’s not trust. Kaworu should know. He remembers, the difference between trust and indifference, between yes and why not, can’t be bothered. He’s inclined to reserve judgment, but neglect is as familiar to him as the old water stain on his ceiling. He knows it when he smells it, and he doesn’t like it.

So he buys Asuka cake, because he can’t be sure she’s getting any at home, and like most things Asuka likes, she snarls at it and spits at it and circles warily before taking a bite, criticizing it all the while (“European sweets are so much better; Japanese people don’t know how to make anything”).

Shinji comes in and asks, “What’s the cake for?”

“It’s Asuka’s birthday,” explains Kaworu.

“Oh. Um.” Shinji flicks a glance at Asuka from his shoes, which seem to be where his gaze automatically vanishes off to whenever she’s in the room. The girl stares unpityingly down at him, licking a crumb off her lips.

“Happy birthday…?” he says slowly, as if pressed by a teacher for the answer to a question he’s not sure of.

She holds him under her gaze for another few squirming seconds before snatching the cake knife from near Kaworu’s elbow and cutting a piece with the force of a decapitation. She throws the slice down on a paper plate like a gauntlet and shoves it at Shinji.

“Here.”

Shinji takes it, looking mortified, and settles uncomfortably at the table between Kaworu and Asuka.

“It’s good, isn’t it,” says Asuka.

“Y-…yeah…”

Asuka peers at him. “Do you really think so? Or are you one of those people who like European sweets better?”

“No! I… I like things like this. European things are too sweet.”

“European bakeries are infinitely superior,” says Asuka easily, “but I suppose you’ve never even been outside of Japan, so you wouldn’t know. I lived in Paris for an year. After living in Paris, one simply can’t tolerate the desserts of any other country.” 

Kaworu suppresses a smirk as Shinji glances around as if imploring Kaworu’s furniture for help. 

Before he can hazard a reply, Asuka rises. “Well. That wasn’t too terrible. I’ll make sure to tell Mom I’ve spoiled my appetite for dinner.”

She’s halfway to the door before Shinji calls, “Wait, don’t you want the…?”

“Oh, since you like Japanese sweets so much, you can have them,” she calls. “You’re too skinny anyways. Bye, Kaworu,” and slams the door.

In the utter silence that follows, Kaworu can’t help wiggling his eyebrows at Shinji.

“I think she’s taken a fancy to you.”

Shinji gives him a look that, although Kaworu knows no Japanese word for it, contains a good mixture of utter horror and visceral disagreement.

()

At the next week’s lesson, Shinji walks in and Asuka says something very strange:

“Hi again.”

“Hello…”

“Hello…” Asuka mocks. She sticks her tongue out, quick as a flash. “What an old-geezer way of saying hi. Who even talks like that any more?”

“Be nice, Asuka-san.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Don’t sass your mother,” says Kaworu, wiggling his finger and managing to startle a laugh out of Asuka and a grin from Shinji. 

When Asuka leaves Shinji’s the shade of a brick wall.

“Nice to see you two are getting along,” comments Kaworu.

“Don’t,” groans Shinji. “She—you know what she did today?”

“Bought you another cake?”

“She showed up at my school!”

Kaworu’s eyebrows shoot up. “Really. Do tell, Shinji-kun, don’t be a tease.”

“I—I don’t even know how she got in, but she showed up right in the middle of English class. Right there at the door! And was, like, ‘Oh, baka-Shinji, we’ve got to go practice duets together.’ The whole class was staring at me…”

“So what did you do?”

“So I went out to the hallway with her and I told her I was in class and could she go away. And then she got all mad at me and yelled at me and then ran off! As if I were the one breaking into other people’s schools and bothering them. And I went back all the boys started saying that I had a, a girlfriend…”

“What’s that face for? Don’t you think dating Asuka-chan would be lovely?”

“Nagisa-sensei, that’s not even remotely funny.”

“…I should tell Asuka you said that—”

“No! No-no-no, don’t—”

“I’m just kidding, Shinji-kun.”

Shinji sinks back into his seat. “Don’t make jokes about things that could get me killed,” he mutters, and Kaworu can’t help laughing.

()

“I can’t do it.”

Kaworu’s almost relieved that Shinji’s finally admitted it.

Not that the statement’s true in the slightest. Rather, he’s suspected from the start that this idea has been lurking in Shinji’s mind. He’s felt it hovering like a cold front over all their sessions, even the more successful ones—and to Kaworu there’s no such thing as a failure of a lesson.

Shinji does this thing where he works himself into a state. It doesn’t even take criticism to trigger it—not Kaworu’s, anyway. Just—invariably, at some point, Shinji flips a switch inside himself, because of some miniscule thing, maybe a note missed twice or a section he fails to memorize or a trill that collapses in on itself, his fingers stumbling from note-to-note like a fatigued ballerina. Something in him shuts down and he begins to, to cycle, to play worse and worse, heavier, steam-rolling the lilting changes in pitch into a flat caricature of the music, and stumbling more and more, the song losing what expression Kaworu’s managed to coax out of him. He never says anything, but Kaworu hears him closing himself off and beating himself down in the way he plays, and at the worst of times he’s seen Shinji’s face go a little red, because he’s breathing funny, shallow and fast, biting his lip almost maliciously as he beats the keys like a housewife cleaning a carpet.

It’s unfair, but truly great playing, like great dancing or great painting or great Olympic skiing, requires an air of effortlessness. All the ease of a white-petalled flower—but springing from a packed soil of tears and headaches and shutdowns and doubt, a hotbed beauty grown under concrete-cracking pressure. Playing the piano is like adjusting a microscope, not steering a car, much less the sort of wide-swinging drunk-driving that Shinji often spirals into.

Shinji’s capable, more than capable, of course. It’s no delusion—Kaworu’s heard it before, that soaring moment when a child runs fast and fast and faster down a hill and jumps—take-off. It’s just that the boy’s so convinced he doesn’t belong among the angels.

“Of course you can,” says Kaworu smoothly.

“No,” says Shinji, quietly but firmly, tongue working nervously around his lips. Digging himself into his own inferiority, like a soldier bedding down in a bomb-filled trench. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Well, you’d better,” hisses Shinji, suddenly hostile. “Because I can’t. I’ve been working on this stupid song for like two whole months already and I, I still sc-screw up on everything.”

“First of all, you don’t even come close to ‘screwing up on everything.’ And second, two months is nothing. The greatest pianists, it’s not like they just get up there and start playing. They practice for years.”

“But I’m not a great pianist. I’m not great at anything. I—at school, I can’t get good grades. I can’t do sports, or dance, or draw, like the other kids. I can’t do maths or write well. The only thing I’m good for is piano and I can’t even do that right. Everyone else plays better than me.”

“What ‘everyone else,’ Shinji? I haven’t met this everyone yet—”

“Stop—just—stop making fun of me, Nagisa-sensei! Stop lying—”

“Shinji, I’m not lying—”

“—to me, stop—just—shut up, I can’t. I can’t do it—”

“You can. You absolutely can.”

“—do it…I can’t… can’t…”

And now Kaworu’s truly worried, because Shinji is hunched over, clutching wizen-fingered at the front of his shirt, sweat running down his neck as he goes pink-faced.

“Shinji-kun? Are you all right?”

He wheezes, grabs jerkily for his schoolbag. The zipper comes undone in spasms, and Shinji, shaking, yanks a small orange capsule out of the front pocket.

He can’t get it open; Kaworu reaches and plucks it gently from Shinji’s hands. The boy flinches away, curling back in on himself and pressing a hand over his mouth as Kaworu unscrews the lid. “How many? One?” Shinji snatches the bottle back from Kaworu and quivers half its contents onto his hand, pills falling like dead beetles across the carpet; he tosses a bunch into his mouth and swallows dry. 

Away and back in a flash, Kaworu offers him a cup of cooling tea—“Slowly,” he warns, but Shinji still downs it too fast and coughs, choking, even as his trembling begins to slow, as he releases his own arms, faint red marks the only sign of the death-grip his fingers had on them seconds before.

As Shinji begins to come down, Kaworu glances at the clock. Still over half an hour left, and in any case, he wouldn’t think of just letting him go after such an incident. He has to find a way to let him know, that in someone’s eyes he’s worth something, that he’s not the failure he thinks he is.

Silently he rises and offers Shinji his chair, a cushy old leather thing that’s just the perfect height to survey the piano from. He slides onto the bench, still warm from Shinji’s body, and raises his hands to the keys.

Like most pianists, Kaworu has a ready litany of melodies running like a fast clear current just beneath his eyelids; irreverently he scoops his hand into the water and catches the first one running by. 

Slow and melancholy, he plays Tchaikovsky’s Barcarolle, unfurling June like a spool of thread into dark water. The Seasons were the first set of songs he memorized; even now, playing them brings him back to the sticky south and that ancient upright piano, creaking and bent-backed as a worndown mother of six. He’d always favored June because she was so cool, a sort of delicious lake-night fantasy to counter the beastly heat and incessant mosquitos of summer, some nearly the length of your index finger, so fond of preying on all the orphanage children. He knows all her corners, stretches them almost indecently slow, a massage of a piece, kneaded smooth as taffy candy.

He intends for it to help calm Shinji down, and sure enough, when the melody trickles to a halt a few minutes later, Shinji is back to breathing normally.

“Tchaikovsky’s Barcarolle,” he says lightly, making no reference to Shinji’s attack. “Do you like it?”

“I don’t know,” mutters Shinji sullenly.

“It’s one of my favorites.”

“At least it’s easy,” says Shinji petulantly, no doubt thinking only of himself. “Something like that, even I could play.”

“Hey,” says Kaworu, gently but firmly. “I happen to think the Seasons take plenty of skill.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Shinji shoots back, his tone of voice saying, I’m an adult, stop trying to fool me like a kid.

“Am not,” chides Kaworu. “That’s one of the wonderful things about the piano—even the simplest pieces offer depth.”

“Yeah, and next you’re going to be saying ‘Hot Cross Buns’ takes skill,” spits Shinji. 

Kaworu knows he shouldn’t let a child get to him, but it’s just so achingly frustrating when he meets people like this, the trophy-sharks and academicians and parent-pushed prodigies who don’t understand that the piano is not a video game to be conquered level by level. That it’s a person, to be talked to and listened to and understood. 

And so he takes Shinji’s unworded challenge and runs with it. He starts out easy—hot, cross, buns. Hot, cross, buns. One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns. Repeats the theme, once, twice. 

Then the fun begins.

Key shift, faster. A trilling scale, like a voice singing up and down the alley on ‘buns.’ The left hand begins to jitter with deep chords, reaching for the depths of the oven. A little syncopation. A streak of incongruous flats and sharps, like burnt chunks of sourdough swept onto the floor. Left and right flicker apart in alternating halves, intertwining flame-like. The right takes the melody and runs it up the chain of keys, the left chasing after like a baker after a mouse. Kaworu closes his eyes and lets it all go. The old tricks from the concert days rise up, the irresistible desire to show off; hands crossing over hands and under, fingers weaving between each other like a shifting straw cage. Notes huddle tight together, then blowing apart, rising in forte like the dough itself, expanding—there, the warm three-tone overchord, the shift back into major like a breath of sunshine. He finishes in a burst of air, hands bounding like deer over the keys in great groups of five or six notes, plucking beams of light in easy chords, and rests his hands one last time on the theme, a faint echo in a falling glissando, hot, cross… 

And lets his hands fall to his lap. Nearly embarrassed now; there was no need to go that far. But he had to make him see.

Indeed, Shinji is finally looking at him—well, staring, slightly slack-jawed.

“What was that?” he says faintly. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Improvisation,” says Kaworu lightly. “It’s how I first learned how to play; it’s easier for me than following a score.” Cheerfully, he rises, and nudges Shinji onto the seat. “Come on, your turn.”

“Oh—no, I don’t know how—I can’t—”

“But the beauty of it is that you can. You see, when there’s nothing written down, there’s absolutely no way to fail.” He smiles at him. “Come on, if an idiot can me like do this, it’ll be nothing for you.”

The rest of the lesson goes like that, and Kaworu thanks god that Shinji is too distracted to dredge the Rachmaninoff back up. Shamelessly he nudges the fallen book a bit further into the bench’s shade, where Shinji won’t see it, and loses himself in working the melody Shinji has chosen; an arbitrary little thing, a thin run in minor of just a few notes, wandered into his home like a child from the cold. Together they explore it, plumb it for depths, shift it this way and that like dressing it in new clothes, and before he knows it the half hour is up and they’ve got a fistful of half-fledged ideas, feathery and warm.

Kaworu stops him before he goes, rummages around in his desk and emerges with a thin peach-colored notepad the shape and size of a woman’s pocketbook. The inside is full of staff paper, and with a glance at Shinji for permission, Kaworu flicks to the second page and sketches down the base of the melody and the key. 

He hands it to Shinji. 

“For you. I’m forgetful myself, so I like to write down my ideas. Don’t think of it as homework, please—just, when you have time, or you’re bored, maybe it’d be nice to come back to this.”

The boy is all fluster; he’s obviously unpracticed at receiving gifts, and ends up shoving it into his satchel in an enormous hurry.

“And Shinji?” says Kaworu, opening the door for him. “Please don’t ever be afraid. I know the piano’s very important to you, but it is not worth panicking over. Music is supposed to make you happy, above all.”

Shinji bows slightly in that peculiarly Japanese way Kaworu’s still yet to get used to, thanks him, and vanishes into the dusk.

()

He gets possessed of an idea in the middle of the night, which is when all his ideas seem to come—rather like a pride of cats.

Perhaps overeager, but he springs the plan on Asuka right away.

She wrinkles her nose at him in supreme disdain. “Du-et? No way. I hate playing with other people.”

Have you ever done it before? thinks Kaworu, but what he says is the far more politic, “Well, of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought it’d be a great help to Shinji.”

And he’s got her, there, he can see it. “You can’t be serious. If I duet with that idiot, he’s just going to bring me down.”

“Or perhaps you two could improve—together.”

After another second of glaring, she points out, “You only have one piano, anyway.”

Of course, duets, or at least the four-hand compositions he has in mind, are usually played with both players on one bench. But Kaworu knows better than to press so far; like a wily general, he intends to secure the low ground before gaining the high. So all he says is, “Well, I have an old electric we could use—”

“I’m not playing an electric,” Asuka yelps. “Make Shinji do it.” 

Kaworu smiles and nods, pacifying. He doesn’t think Asuka’s even noticed her tacit admission of defeat. And because he’s happy with her, he lets her get away with propping her feet up on the arm of his couch as he drags the electric out of his closet. She even deigns to plug it in for him, although she loudly points out how flat it sounds when he runs an experimental scale up the keys.

When he walks in, Shinji’s expression is of utter alarm, bordering on sheer panic. Perched at the piano bench, Asuka eyes him predatorily.

“Good afternoon, Shinji-kun,” says Kaworu. “As you can see, I thought we’d try something different today…”

()

“…it’s a way of getting them out of their heads, you see.” Kaworu shifts the phone to his other ear; stirs rice with a dull pair of chopsticks. The bottom is burnt—he can never quite seem to get the hang of cooking…

“That way Shinji can’t do the cycling thing,” he continues, “because he’s busy trying to accommodate Asuka, and Asuka can’t just bang away at whatever tempo she likes because she has to think about what Shinji’s doing. It’s so funny watching her—I gave Shinji, that’s the boy, the bass line, so she keeps trying to run away with the treble and they end up like two entire beats off. Shinji’s more stubborn than I gave him credit for—he doesn’t speed up an inch! Steady as a metronome… It’s like watching two dogs pull in opposite ways on a leash; the first day that poor Dance was just getting stretched and snagged between them until the whole thing was coming apart at the seams.”

Silence on the other end; others would find it off-putting, but Rei’s always been like that. Since birth they’ve been as oil to water, Kaworu full of rainbow-shifting words, Rei still and deep as a calm lake. He doesn’t understand why more people aren’t drawn to her; from what he’s seen of society, most people are only looking for an ear to pour their troubles into. Still, he supposes, even the most unbalanced of relationships requires a little more… verbal input than Rei’s usually willing to offer.

“…sounds like you’re having fun,” she says after a while.

“I am. I am. And you?”

More silence, but he knows she’s shrugging (and that’s another thing: she’s never seemed to grasp the concept that the telephone doesn’t convey visuals). He asks her a few more questions, about her studies (some neurochemical business that Kaworu doesn’t have the audacity to pretend he understands), her research, the university, and susses out what meaning he can from her sparse responses. 

Near the end, she informs him quite casually that she might be dropping by Tokyo “someday.”

“Really? Like on a vacation?”

“For work. There’s a conference next summer that my professor wants to attend.”

It hits him, then, how long it’s been since they’ve talked face-to-face. More than two years—they’ve let time slip away from them. And to think he used to believe they couldn’t survive apart.

“Do,” he says. “Please do come. It’d be great to see you again.”

“Yes,” she agrees blandly, and he knows she means it.

()

The duets continue for one week, two, three. The first few tries are a mess of the kind that only stubborn thirteen-year-olds can produce. Sometimes Asuka and Shinji sink so deep into the tunnels of their own opinions that Kaworu has to clap the beat to drag them back to the surface, like flushing rabbits out of a hole. But by the end of the month they’ve glared, bickered, and whined their way through a decent four-hand (although Kaworu wisely pushes back his date on introducing the real four-hand technique).

Perhaps more importantly, they’ve apparently started socializing regularly outside of lessons. The gist he’s gotten from Asuka’s casual asides and Shinji’s embarrassed revelations is that their schools are close enough that Asuka can “swing by” and eat lunch with Shinji. They’ve also begun walking each other to the subway station after school, a fact which Kaworu finds so adorably charming that he has a bit of a difficult time concealing his delight. 

It’s a touch sinister, maybe, but Kaworu also uses the two of them to—well, spy on one another. The fact remains that these two children are, out of all his students, the most impervious to personal inquiries. Asuka throws her words about her like a snowscreen, and Shinji plaster walls of silence around himself. But neither is particularly averse to talking about the other.

So—Asuka thrusting her bruised knee in his face. “It’s huge, isn’t it?”

“It’s… considerable. Do you need a band-aid?”

She ignores him. “This is all that idiot’s fault, you know.”

“Shinji-kun?”

“What other idiot could I be talking about? Oh, by the way, bet you a thousand yen that his books are all wrinkly and wet today.”

“Asuka-san, I know I’ve done nothing to deserve your good opinion, but please don’t think I’m foolish enough to bet you on something you clearly know to be true.”

“God, Nagisa-sensei, your sentences just get longer every time I see you. You talk just like somebody’s girlfriend, you know.”

“I’ll save that up as a compliment. So why would I be losing this bet?”

“We were walking back from school, and these two thugs from Shinji’s school started picking on him.”

“Please don’t tell me one of them gave you that.”

“What are you going to do about it?” She glances at Kaworu’s face, then away abruptly. “Anyway, it wasn’t them. I fell when I was running down from the road. They threw his books into the river. The water was freezing. I told him to just buy new ones, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He swam right into that river. That thing’s filthy! You know there’s always news reports about dead bodies and stuff like that being found in the river. He didn’t even get all his stupid books back. I bet he’s—I told him, you know, ‘I bet you’re gonna get pneumonia. Don’t come crying to me when it happens.’ Just watch, Nagisa-sensei. He’s not gonna show up today.” She puts her finger to her nose, coyly. “Pneumonia,” she hisses, as if it’s some personal vendetta.

When Asuka leaves and Shinji comes in, Kaworu gets to hear the exact same story—except the way Shinji tells it—

“Asuka got into a fight today.”

“That sounds characteristic.”

“She’s crazy! There were these two guys… Anyways, somehow she got really mad at them.” There’s a faint smile playing about Shinji’s mouth. “She kicked one of them so hard in the leg I think he was crying.”

Kaworu nods at his books—indeed, water-logged and puffy as all hell. “Does that have anything to do with this?”

“Oh.” Shinji sobers. “One of them… One of the guys hit her. So then I, um, I punched him, and he threw my books into the river—we were on a bridge when it happened. Sorry.”

“Asuka-san told me you swam the river to get them back.”

He fidgets and looks away. “I guess.”

“You guess?” teases Kaworu. “They didn’t fish themselves out of the river, Shinji-kun.”

“It’s no big deal. I really wanted them back.”

Later that evening, Kaworu realizes he’s out of milk and makes an emergency run to the store to get some. On his way back, the faint rush of the river teases the nape of his neck. Feeling rather like a teenage delinquent, he sneaks around the fence and slides down the steep embankment until he feels mud envelop his shoes. Nearly blind in the dark, he tips his hand forwards until it hits the water. It’s so cold that it feels at first like burning.

“Pneumonia,” he mutters, clambering back up onto the road. A noise behind him startles him, and he turns, already stooped in a half-bow of apology. He finds himself bowing to nothing more than a little black cat, which accepts the gesture with a look of supreme indifference before bounding down the road.

()

The day before the Volgograd prelims, after two smooth run-throughs of the Rachmaninoff, Shinji says nervously, “I, um, searched you up the other day. On NicoNico.”

“NicoNico?”

Shinji throws him some major side-eye before he can stop himself. Kaworu likes it, the scorn, because it implies familiarity, a certain level of comfortableness between them. “It’s like, um, a video website… You seriously don’t know what it is?”

“I’m afraid I’m rather a neophyte at technology.” Never a truer statement—he’s touched a computer about five times in his life. “So I’m on this NicoNico thing?”

“Yeah, I guess someone taped your old performances. It was—amazing. But—”

“Yes…?”

“I don’t know, you seemed really—different? I don’t know how to put it, but when I first watched it I thought it might be a different person.”

“Because there’s so many albino pianists wandering around, right?” teases Kaworu.

“I, I mean, I like knew it had to be you, but it didn’t seem like you.”

“No, I understand. I—was. A very different sort of person back then.”

“Um, I don’t know if this is rude, but can I ask you something maybe kind of personal?”

“Fire away.”

“Why’d you quit? Playing professionally, I mean. You’re, uh, pretty young—”

“Well thank you. Thirty-one next month; I’m growing into my white hair.”

Shinji blushes, continues. “And it’s not like playing piano’s like a sport or something, most pianists keep playing past their sixties. And, well, you got famous so young, and I read the—the comments,” he rushes on, “and people were all saying how it was so weird and too bad that you quit so suddenly.”

“Hm. I have to agree with all those ‘people,’ it was considered a rather—well, very odd move at the time. Stupid, a lot of people told me, even selfish, irresponsible. I was at the peak and I threw it all away.” He’s quite aware of Shinji’s eyes on him, and sips his tea, slowly. This is only time he can remember that one of his students has asked him this (or any of their parents, for that matter); in retrospect it’s shocking that the question hadn’t come up earlier.

But it leaves him unprepared, now. How to explain it? He feels the old, habitual guardedness rising hard inside him—don’t tell him everything, don’t give it away. Clutching his secrets to him like an old granny squeezing her handbag in a dark alley; scared of shadows, scared of nothing.

“The short answer is, I didn’t like the type of person it made me,” he says finally. Resorting to ambiguities again, his mind taunts. Throwing up that smoke screen? I can’t help it, thinks Kaworu. Not at all defensive. It doesn’t matter; he’s just mildly curious.

Shinji nods, slow, and throws a curveball straight through Kaworu’s window.

“What do you mean by that?”

Kaworu sighs, and puts down his cup. 

There’s no helping it, now.

()

I didn’t grow up here, as I’m sure you know. I was raised—me and my sister—

\--You’ve got a sister?

Yes, we’re twins.

You seem like an only child.

People say that about Rei, too. But back where we were raised, everyone knew we were one of a pair. She’s an albino, you see, just like me. 

We never knew our parents. I don’t know if it was because of our looks that we were abandoned—people in the American south can be very suspicious. It was easy to understand if you lived there. I can’t really explain it, but the environment was in a way that witchcraft didn’t seem far away… It wasn’t as ordered a place as Tokyo, nothing near.

We were lucky to be taken in by an orphanage. But all the kids there were scared of us, and it’s an easy turn from fear to hate. The long shot is that for a long, long time, we got used to relying on nobody but each other. At some point we must have assumed that it would always be like that: us against the world.

I took up the piano out of sheer boredom. There was an old upright rotting away in a sort of storage room-basement area underneath the house. All the kids said that place was haunted, and one day they locked me in there. Said I could hang out with my ghost friends. I’m sure I cried or something for a while, and in the process of stumbling around the room looking for a light I ran straight into the piano.

There was no sheet music, of course—that place barely had enough food and beds for the kids. But here was this magical thing, this creature I’d seen in picture books or heard on the radio the headmistress always kept on in her office. And I was determined to figure it out, if only because there was nothing else to do.

But of course there’s a proper way to learn classical piano, a sort of foundation every teacher lays down, scales and chords and majors and minors and so forth. And because me and Rei didn’t have any of that, we sort of made it up as we went, and the house we built, so to speak, turned out very crooked and particular. For example, we’d never heard of writing a piece in a certain time, or that the left hand usually sticks to the left side, or to stay in a particular key, or even what keys were. So I’m sure our playing sounded like a bunch of nails being dropped on the floor—luckily the piano was underground, or our education would’ve been cut off quite early, I assure you.

But I loved it. And because I had no idea I was going about everything all wrong, I was totally fearless. I only knew what I liked, and the melodies I’d just pick out of my head, like you’d pick wild mushrooms. Whatever caught my fancy, some snippets from daydreams, I’d throw it all in there and—just, play.

So you guys couldn’t even read sheet music?

We were musically illiterate as fifteenth-century beggars—and I assure you our actual English skills weren’t much better.

So then what?

A stroke of fate. A fairy godmother appeared, so to speak—although the godmother in question was about fifty years old and the shape of a cue ball, short and round with an enormous mustache; he was like something out of a cartoon—I’d show you a photo but I don’t think I have any… 

Occasionally some mildly famous and wealthy people would visit the house. The donors who kept it running, I understand. Me and Rei were always firmly hidden away—like a smart storeowner, the headmistress only put her cleanest, prettiest children on display—but we’d still peep at them through the slats of the staircase. But this time they brought this strange sphere of a man with them. A family friend or some such thing, I’m not sure. I wasn’t here for this, so I’ll tell you what Rei said. They were going on the grand tour and he heard me plunking away. Perked right up, like ‘a dog catching a scent,’ she said. And he absolutely demanded to know what the sound was. 

Perhaps he found the utter ridiculousness of my playing appealing; avant-garde or some such thing. The fact was that somewhere along the way my hands had gotten pretty fast and pretty sharp. And so the ghoul was released from the basement. You should’ve heard him yell! That man always did have big reactions to everything. “My goodness,” he said, “you’ve brought out the house poltergeist!” And after he’d, I don’t know, ascertained I was a genuine human and everything, he asked where I’d learned to play like that, to which I said I’d taught myself. And he said I was a genius, and I said, “Oh, no, everyone thinks we’re idiots.” 

And he said, “we?” 

I owe everything to that man. He brought us out of that wretched place, gave us everything at once. The first time we had chocolate, Rei and I ate two whole boxes and threw up afterwards and then ate more. We were sixteen, but we acted like infants. And we had lessons, proper lessons, and a teacher to beat our hands into the right posture and correct our fingerings and boatloads of sheet music. It really was an entirely new world. 

()

After Shinji leaves, Kaworu decides to put aside the Rachmaninoff. He runs through his other student’s pieces in his heavily-pencilled books and sheets, making notes or corrections or just jotting down thoughts half-formed in lesson. 

He feels—odd. Unsteady, perhaps; no doubt Rei would be able to phrase it better. Maybe it’s just that he hasn’t thought about his childhood in such a long time. Or perhaps it’s the queasiness of knowing what comes after that supposed happy-ending, all the oily, tar-colored disasters he shied away from telling Shinji.

Maybe it’s just the vertigo of revealing so much at once, a weird sort of head-rush. Even in his professional days, his biographies never said much, other than that he was an American; his birth year is anyone’s guess and his home city most often listed as New Orleans even though he’s never been there. Of the orphanage, the piano in the cellar, the loneliness and confusion and the bruised kneecaps, never a word.

It feels—good, he thinks. Like opening a window in an old, dusty room. It’s kind of amusing, how it was Shinji, of all people in the world. A more reticent creature surely never—

His buzzer rings out like a chainsaw. Kaworu’s fingers tumble over themselves, tangle, the music stammering to a halt.

Who in the world…?

When he opens the door, it’s to a woman he’s never seen before. She’s maybe in her early thirties, wearing a red jacket and tall boots and a necklace with a chunky cross on it, oddly archaic looking. Her hair has curling streaks of violet in it, like ribbons forgotten from some rebellious teenage phrase.

She’s staring at him with a hard, clenched expression—familiar, to Kaworu, and he slides right into his polite, somewhat glazed smile, blank and hard as plastic and worn at the elbows from overuse.

“Can I help you?”

“Nagisa Kaworu.” 

“That is me.”

“You’re Shinji Ikari’s piano tutor.”

“You seem to know all about me,” he half-teases, and her expression softens a smidgeon.

“I’m Katsuragi Misato. I teach music at his school.”

They shake hands over the doorframe, warily as generals cementing an alliance. She doesn’t seem to expect to be invited inside.

“So…” he prompts, after a few seconds. “Can I help you with anything?”

“Shinji-kun is competing at that—thing tomorrow.”

“Yes. The Volgograd preliminaries. I have the highest hopes.”

She sighs. “It’s such a brutal competition.”

“Shinji-kun’s been preparing for a long time.”

“Well, that’s…” 

Katsuragi Misato keeps trailing off, but not in a purposeless manner—more like there’s so many words seething inside her that they’re boiling over the pot lid and spilling to the counter. 

“I don’t know why I came here,” she says after a moment, uncrossing and recrossing her arms. “It’s too late to do anything about this now.”

“I’m sorry,” says Kaworu, because he doesn’t know what else to say. I don’t know why you came here, either.

She laughs humorlessly. “I had some notion, like I was going to put a stop to this.”

“Please have some faith in him, Katsuragi-san.”

She looks oddly at him, then, as if he’s given a wrong answer to a math problem.

“I suppose I will,” she says. “Good night.”

“Good night,” he echoes. He doesn’t close the door right away. The woman passes in and out of the streetlights, adjusting her jacket, back as straight as a steel file. Then she turns a corner and is gone.

()

The prelims take place on a Saturday morning under a sky like a scoured steel sheet. As typical for this sort of event, it’s hosted by a small local university, abandoned on the weekend but for the waves of children filing in for their auditions.

Asuka arrives an hour before her scheduled time; Kaworu’s heart sinks when he sees that she’s alone, the sole parentless figure in the crowd. She dumps her folder of music in his hands like a load of trash and loudly says, “Mom came down with a really bad headache this morning, so she couldn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she feels better.”

“Okay, yeah, where’s registration?” she spits, and stomps off towards the two startled-looking middle-aged women manning the check-in booth, where she proceeds to obtain her badge à la Spanish Inquisition. 

Kaworu spends the next half hour leaning against the door of a tiny practice room (“Quit standing so close, I can feel you breathing down my neck, geez”) and listening to Asuka warm up. Occasionally he calls advice through the door—“Watch the tempo, there,” “crisp! Crisper on the mordent, D-e-d-C-a-c,” “that’s a flat, not a natural”—but mainly he keeps his opinions to himself, aware that heaping criticisms on at this point will only help capsize the boat.

Fifteen minutes before audition time he insists mildly that she stop playing (“you’ll just tire your hands out”). She kicks the door open and grabs his arm. “Let’s go on a walk.”

So they stroll between the stares and out a little into the quiet university grounds, over the patchy lawns and gum-stained pavement. Asuka doesn’t speak, other than to point out with a snicker that people might mistake them for father-and-daughter.

“We certainly have odd enough hair to match,” says Kaworu, thinking good, let them think that if they want. “We can be le mysterious Americans.”

“Ew, not America.”

“Germans, then?”

“I like Germans better.”

“Sehr gut, Fraulein Langley.”

“Your accent’s a-tro-cious.”

“Pardonne moi.”

“That’s French!”

Before they know it time’s up and they’re standing in front of the classroom where the judges await. No one but the contestant is allowed in, so when the volunteer comes out to call her name, Kaworu just smiles at Asuka and holds the door for her.

“You’ll be amazing.”

“We’ll see,” is all she says, before blazing into the room.

“It wasn’t amazing, but I did all right,” is her self-assessment when she re-emerges some twenty minutes later. Her hair’s come undone again and she bundles it impatiently over her shoulder. Kaworu smiles—Asuka’s all right is other players’ brilliant. “Let’s not talk about it. Where’s that idiot?”

“You mean Shinji-kun? Want to wish him luck?”

“I’ll tell him to break a leg,” growls Asuka, and Kaworu laughs.

Shinji, too, arrives without a parent in tow, although he is chauffeured in by a large, impassive man driving a sleek black car.

“You show-off,” says Asuka, yanking Shinji’s door open as he steps gingerly out.

“It’s not like I wanted to!”

“Su-reee,” she drawls.

“Really. I hate it when people stare. It’s so awkward.”

“You’d better get used to it if you want the two of us around,” says Kaworu, catching up to the two kids. “Hey, Shinji-kun. Feeling okay?”

“All right,” he mumbles.

“Uh huh,” says Asuka. “Try not to puke.”

“Asuka, are you already done?”

“Yup. We’ve agreed not to talk about it, right Kaworu?”

“Oh, well…” Shinji trails off, no doubt casting for something to say. “I’m sure you did really good.”

“Oh, admit it. You want to beat me, don’t you? Since only one of us can go on to the finals.”

“Come on, no in-fighting between my students.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

After looking at his shoes for about a minute, Shinji finally says, pained-sounding, “Well, yeah.”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I guess I sort of do. But that’s—I don’t think that’s wrong, right? I mean I’ll be really happy, um, I’ll be just as happy if you win. And, and, anyway, even if I win… I mean, if it comes down to the two of us I’m sure you’ll win—”

Asuka finally leans back. She looks—almost satisfied.

“Stupid,” she says triumphantly. “As if I care who wins. Anyway, even if you win, I’ll still know I’m better, right? At least I’m not a baka-Shinji!” She hits him on the head, but lightly, the way a cat would cuff her kitten. “So stop worrying about me and just play.”

As he walks the two of them to the practice rooms, Kaworu can’t help quietly asking, “Your dad couldn’t be here?”

“N-no… said he was busy…”

And good riddance. At least this way, if things don’t go well, there won’t be that pressure to deal with. And, of course, he has to admit it—there’s always that chance that things won’t go well. With a competition like the Volgograd, even the regionals are intense. He has full faith in Shinji and Asuka, of course, and they’re brilliant, but—

Kaworu cuts himself off. What’s he doing? Whatever happens, happens. Inside the warm-up room, Shinji runs through his scales, goes through the first few pages of his audition piece. He doesn’t sound like he’s panicking too badly—he probably has Asuka to thank for that.

And very, very soon, it seems, the volunteer is stepping out from the room and calling, “Ikari Shinji? Ikari Shinji-san?”

Shinji stands too quickly and almost falls over his own feet. Asuka scoffs and says, “You know, when I said break a leg, I didn’t really mean to do it,” which gets a pale smile from Shinji. “Okay, hurry up and get in there before they think you’ve gone missing or something.”

Asuka spends the twenty minutes pacing up and down the hallway like a caged tiger, startling other, meeker contestants out of her way, while Kaworu tries and fails to eavesdrop—the soundproofing on that room is something else. Just as with Asuka, he watches the hands of his watch move in a mood almost nervous, tracing the route of the song along the seconds—here, the second movement, there the return and repeat, passing inevitably towards the coda. He imagines Shinji sweeping through every note with calm and brilliance and strength, clear as the wind and mighty as the sea, as if by dint of wishing he could burn every possible stumble out of existence altogether.

When Shinji comes back out, he is sweating and pale. He says nothing at all, and for once Asuka does not press him. Kaworu is tempted to tell them that there’s nothing more they can do, but somehow he thinks the advice will be ill-received. 

At three, they pile into the university’s performance hall, which buzzes with all the pent-up energy of a war room. Shinji slouches so ferociously into his plush seat that he threatens to vanish into it altogether. Asuka throws her feet up on the chair in front of her, her foot jiggering away at jackhammer speed, and Kaworu has to tell her to put it down as the room fills up.

At precisely three-thirty, they’re plunged into darkness as the stage brightens in an alchemical trade of light. A crackling hush flattens the crowd.

The opening pomp-and-circumstance, the thanks to the various organizations and sponsorships, the gratifying general praise that satisfies exactly no one, and the tedious administrative explanations seem to wind on and on. All these rules about who will take whose place upon illness (“or in case of other incapacitation,” the judge reads solemnly, as if the contestants were soldiers going off into battle)—not even the presidential succession can possibly involve this much decrying and declaiming. Kaworu’s jaw stiffens with stifled yawns as he sneaks glances at the people around them. A woman a row in front of them and to the left looks like she’s about to cry in earnest; her husband is grasping their child’s shoulder so tightly that the child keeps trying to pull away, to no avail. One man’s clutching a string of Buddhist prayer beads. 

This whole affair strikes Kaworu as ridiculous, suddenly. Petty.

A snatch of movement across his lap—abruptly, Asuka has reached across Kaworu and grabbed Shinji’s hand. Shinji’s eyes, flashed upwards, are large and startled, wet-looking and dark as a deer’s.

Their hands remain like that, tied like the knot of a seatbelt in front of Kaworu’s stomach, as the judge clears his throat and finally begins.

“Ah, now that we’ve gotten that all out of the way, it’s time to announce the top placers of this year’s competition.”

It’s difficult to tell which of his students is squeezing the other harder.

“In fourth place, we have—Miss Langley Asuka.”

Kaworu’s heart jolts, even as the obligatory storm of applause begins to come down. All this waiting, and it still happened before he was ready.

“Congratulations,” he calls, but Asuka has already risen, storming down the aisle like a bullet down its groove. Holding the marble-and-gold trophy like a club, she drops a small, awkward curtsey. Kaworu sits back and breaths. Fourth place in the Volgograd preliminaries. It’s an astounding accomplishment. Suddenly, he realizes he should have brought a camera or something, to capture the girl standing stock-straight on the stage like a flash-frozen flame. 

Already, they’re moving on. The applause rises and falls like a veil of static, punctual as a puppet on strings. “Third place: Aida Kensuke. Second, Horaki Hikari.” The boy, curly-haired and wearing a massive pair of old-man spectacles, bounces from overlarge foot to overlarge foot, waving at some well-wisher in the crowd; the girl accepts her award with a smile clenched like a fist as Asuka stares out into the darkness, expression impenetrable. With every name, Shinji seeks deeper into the seat, biting his own knuckles. Kaworu eyes him—if he has an attack right now, they’ll have to clamber over dozens of people to get out. 

The applause for Horaki Hikari begins to die out. As the crowd shifts and tenses like a pack of wolves scenting blood, Kaworu squeezes Shinji’s shoulder.

“It’s all right,” he says. “It’ll be over soon.”

Shinji seizes Kaworu’s shirt sleeve, and presses his face into his arm. Startled, there is a moment in which Kaworu wavers, unsure what to do. It is in that state that the words fall down on them like the sword of God.

“First place. Shinji Ikari.”

()

Part one: fin.

**Author's Note:**

> so self-indulgent but i don't even care


End file.
